Why Have Animals As Characters? by Victoria Chatham

 

AVAILABLE HERE

I love all animals. Even little critters, like frogs. They give me the creeps, but I find them fascinating. By far my favourite animals are horses and dogs, and more recently, cats. Animals have long had their place in literature.

Think Bolingbroke’s horse Barbary from Shakespeare’s King Richard II or grey Capilet in Twelfth Night. There is, of course, the ubiquitous Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, Don Quixote’s Rocinante, and Marguerite Henry’s Sham from her book King of the Wind. Zane Grey named many of the horses in his western novels, as did Louis L’Amour. Smoky, Ginger, Merrylegs, Artax, The Black, Joey are names that I have known and love from the stories in which they appeared.

Who can forget Buck from Call of the Wild, or Bulls Eye, Bill Sikes’ dog from Oliver Twist, and didn’t we all love Perdita and Pongo, the Dalmatians from 101 Dalmatians? Stephen King’s Cujo might have given some of us nightmares, as did The Hound of the Baskervilles, but I don’t mind betting cute little Peg from Lady and the Tramp had you smiling again. Cats, albeit to a lesser degree, also have their place in literature, such as Crookshanks from the Harry Potter tales, Tab from Watership Down and all those marvellous cat characters from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Old Deuteronomy, Rumpleteazer, Rum Tum Tugger all appeared in the musical Cats.

Lennard

I write historical and contemporary western romance novels, so it's almost impossible for me not to include animal characters. In my cozy mystery series, my amateur sleuth, Winnie Hatherall, has a lovable big mixed-breed dog named Lennard. How did my Regency Lord get from his London residence to his country estate? He either drove his team himself or was driven by his coachman. A team of four horses, plus a couple of park hacks in town and hunters in the country, added up to a minimum of a stable of eight horses. The better those horses were kept, the longer they were of service, so would all have been named and known as individuals.

What I try to bring to my pages when I write horses into my novels is how that particular animal impacts my hero or heroine. They usually have a part to play in showing off my characters’ skills, as they do for Emmaline in His Dark Enchantress. In Shell Shocked, set at the end of World War 1, the dog, Bella, helps her master recuperate from his experiences at the front. In my contemporary western romances, what cowboy does not have a horse, and often a dog, both for work and company?

Animals, real or imagined, help ground us humans with their sense of immediacy, of being in the here and now. Animals add so much to my life, and I want that for my characters, too.

Victoria Chatham

AT BWL PUBLISHING INC

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